jimhines

While at Penguicon, whenever I used my phone in the lobby, it would try to connect to the local wireless networks, which means I was routinely greeted with this screen:

I don’t know the story behind the network names. I overheard one rumor that “rape rape rape rape rape” was an official Penguicon network. When I e-mailed someone on Penguicon staff, I was told it probably wasn’t, but they weren’t 100% certain. I haven’t yet gotten confirmation one way or another.

My guess is that someone was trying to be edgy and provocative. As sometimes happens, they overshot “edgy” and landed squarely in the “asshole” category.

There will always be people who try to be shocking and fail. I suspect this wasn’t an official Penguicon network, and was instead just a random cry for attention. (Though if it turns out that it was an official Penguicon network, I think that may be the last time I attend this con.)

ETA: Randy Bradakis, who is on the Penguicon ConCom and Board left the following comment (with the disclaimer that he’s not speaking for Penguicon as a whole here):

I can state firmly that this was not created at the request of the Penguicon ConCom, and that there will be discussions about both the reasons that this is unacceptable and how we can be certain that it is not repeated. While it might, in some specific in-joke sort of way, have been amusing to the creators at whatever other location it was created for, it is not the sort of “joke” that should be part of the Penguicon environment.

There are plans for more specific network requests for next year, and I will make it my recommendation that we at least have someone at the ConCom level give specific instructions to the networking staff about the image we wish to present.

I want you to know that I am deeply sorry for any offense that this caused. At any and all levels of future convention running that I am involved, I will strive to keep the idea of a safe and comfortable environment foremost in everyone’s mind, and encourage this behavior in my fellow Con-runners as well.

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On a similarly annoying note, I’ve been reading The Becoming by Jeanne Stein. Within the first chapter, our heroine Anna Strong is attacked and raped by the bad guy, who turns out to be a vampire. I almost stopped reading right there, due to the “Let’s use rape to get this story started!” approach, but I’m trying to read more urban fantasy as context for my own work-in-progress.

I’m now more than halfway through the book. The word rape has vanished, and Strong’s character has now begun to refer to the incident as when a vampire had sex with her. (In addition, while our heroine is female, so far every other significant character has been male … but that’s a different rant.)

Writing about rape is difficult, in no small part because everyone’s reaction is different. But when an author uses rape as a plot device to get the story moving, pulls out the “rape = sex” fallacy, and doesn’t seem to indicate any physical or emotional effects on the character (save becoming a vampire, naturally) … well, for me it puts the book squarely into the “Doing it Wrong” category.

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Comments and discussion welcome, as always.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

The final tally from the rape crisis center fundraiser was $1553. My thanks to everyone who donated. Congratulations to Maria Lima, who won the ARC of Snow Queen’s Shadow. I’ll be notifying the other three winners in the next day or so.

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Each year, Brenda Novak runs an auction to raise money for diabetes research. Her efforts passed the one million dollar mark last year, and she’s still going strong. My contribution to this year’s auction is a critique of a short story or the first chapter of a novel. The auction runs through the end of the month, and you can bid here.

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Penguicon was a blast, as always. No con is perfect, and there were a few bumps over the weekend (like the dealers room having zero of my books on hand), but overall I had tremendous fun meeting and talking to people, being a smart-ass on panels, and just generally catching up with everyone.

April was a busy month, and I’m still working on getting my brain back up to what passes for functional for me, but here are some of my thoughts from this weekend.

• I know a lot of very smart, funny, nifty people.
• No matter how successful I become, I will never be as popular as a simple cardboard box.
• The first rule of princess mafia is that you don’t talk about princess mafia.  …Aw, crap. Never mind!
• Apparently my jacket contains its own TARDIS. (This observation brought to you by John Scalzi.)
• I sometimes struggle to balance the need to present useful, intelligent information on panels with the need to be a smart-ass. (But it’s the smart-ass stuff that ends up on Twitter!)
• For male authors, there may be a correlation between hair and number of books published. Evidence is here.
• Courtesy of Catherine Shaffer, we now know how many licks it takes to get to the center of a SFWA president.
• Never tell a former NASA scientist that the moon landing was faked. (Also, ouch, my poor face…)
• The longer I hang out at the bar, the more profanity slips into my conversation. Need to remember to flip that switch back before returning to work!
• I have damn good legs.
• I trust myself to do a good job as Toastmaster at ConFusion, but I don’t know if I can top Howard Tayler in a tux.
• Some good photos from John Scalzi and Al Bogdan.

I’ll have more thoughts about the cons and some of the panels, but for now, I’ll just say I’m glad I went. I ended up doing an episode of Writing Excuses with Howard Tayler and Brandon Sanderson, which was fun. Sold a goodly number of books, had some great conversations (and some bizarre conversations), shared a super-DAW-twin reading with Saladin Ahmed, got a Tom Smith song stuck in my head (for two days and counting), and just generally had a great time.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

Dawn’s in trouble.  Jim blew up some internet yesterday. Must be Tuesday.

Some follow-up thoughts to my post about conventions and membership comp policies.

I screwed up. I wrote that post in part to sort out my own feelings about what was and wasn’t fair before contacting Penguicon about scheduling and money issues. However, I ignored the fact that this is the internet, and of course my post would get back to the Penguicon staff, who would likely feel a bit blind-sided and attacked. It’s not like this is my first time online, and I should have contacted them privately before blogging about that aspect. Mea culpa, and I apologize to the folks at Penguicon.

Two links that came out of yesterday’s discussion:

• Windycon’s reimbursement policies.
• Penguicon’s FAQ on “nifty” guests.

My thanks to everyone who participated in the conversation. That’s one of the things I love about blogging — I hear different sides of an argument, and get a better understanding of various perspectives, whether I agree with them all or not. A number of factors seem to come into play with reimbursement policies, including the size of the con, the age of the con (startup cons may not have the budget to cover memberships), the location (U.S. and non-U.S. cons seem to have different attitudes … perhaps related to size), and the type of con (relaxacon vs. Big Media Con vs. professional-oriented vs. fan-oriented, and so on.)

The one thing I keep coming back to is the importance of communication. In many of the stories of program participants getting angry over convention policies, one of the biggest problems was people didn’t know they were expected to pay for membership until much later, sometimes when they showed up at the convention. A con has the right to make whatever policies they choose, but I think it’s very important to make sure everyone’s aware of those policies up front so that the participants can decide whether or not it’s worth their time to attend.

Ideally, it seems like it would be helpful for the initial communication between con and participants to include the following:

• Is this an invitation to be a participant, or just a poll who might want to do programming? (There was discussion and disagreement on what constituted an official invitation to participate at a con.)
• What is the reimbursement policy for participants?
• In the case of something like Penguicon, with different tiers of participants, what exactly would the arrangement be for this guest? (Turns out I’m a “nifty” guest, meaning I wouldn’t have to pay the $25 … but I didn’t find that out until yesterday.)

Finally, it occurs to me that it’s easy for me to sit back and tell the con staff what they should do. However, while I feel that these are all valid points and worth discussing, it’s also important to remember that the con staff are volunteers, and they work their asses off. As someone who enjoys the con experience, I want to thank everyone who chips in to make them happen.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.